Flurry.
T: Consider this an experimental piece and, yes, that does mean I want you to be softer than normal! AU and, as this is part of a set of three, there will be a few unresolved plot issues! You can also expect my normal X cocktail of slash, angst and a dusting of theorising. I am not a member of Clamp, you can tell this from the fact that I'm writing this rather than drawing it!
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A burst of magic, a white hot heat and then my life had become something other than it had once been.
Before…before there was so much that I had to look forward to, a path to tread and many great wonders to experience.
After…after there was only the sorrow and the red rain.
I was the first and I should have been the last.
My life was the price, after all.
I was not the last.
Those I had believed my allies were, in fact, my enemies and that which I had feared beyond everything else had come true.
The poison I had thought to staunch with my sacrifice had, in fact, become stronger for it, had become an unbearable hell.
My hell.
For years I tried to escape, called out to those with ears to hear me and, one by one, those great men had fallen to the taint of the snow.
Had become its slave.
Still I battled the seduction contained within the flurry, recited the protective mantras until the edges of my spirit frayed.
Until I lost my self awareness.
The flurry claimed me then and I became as part of its seduction, my voice one of the many among its siren song.
The power of my voice reached ears that the flurry had never before been able to claim and it became stronger.
Became an all consuming darkness.
Then one crossed into the flurry and was not taken, its voice falling useless against the power she held.
I looked upon her face and, for the first time in millennia I recalled what I had once been.
Recalled, at last, my wish and the false price that I had paid in order to see it fulfilled.
Smiling she spoke my name and told me,
"I will set you free."
The words were the sweetest that I had ever heard and yet, stung for that ancient betrayal, I asked her,
"What is the price?"
I listened as she told me of what my freedom would cost and, desperation driving the words, I told her,
"I shall do as you ask."
I stepped again into the flurry, not this time to be claimed but rather to claim.
Using the power in my voice I twisted the harmony and then used it to call forward those who would be as my salvation.
I recall them all: mother, son, doll and sacrifice.
The mother: so very beautiful and so very empty, her heart filled only with the passion of her lust and the desire for death.
The son: Lost within his mother's shadow, an empty shell that had tried, so very vainly, to find something to fill it up.
The doll: An innocent life enticed, caught and broken by the flurry. A fractured heart that will never be whole again.
The sacrifice: Her life was the heaviest cost, a price that I had wished not to pay and a secret I must keep always.
If not for me they never would have met and their lives would have been something other than they became.
Yet they would never have been able to experience the thrill contained within the flurry, would never have known emotions such as the ones that they experienced within its influence.
She smiles whenever I tell her this, the thing as reassuring and as empty as it had been the first that we had met.
Always when I see that expression I ask her,
"Why do you smile?"
And always she replies,
"Because you make it sound as though you had a choice."
I have never asked her what she means by those words, or why she had asked of me a price that was not mine to give.
I am afraid that if I do as such she will prove as false as the first 'wish granter' and that this hard bought freedom will be lost to me.
Time rolls on and though I dream often of the flurry, of those that fell to its song, this seems a fair price when weighed against all that I have gained.
It is a sticky summer morning when I see her again, and smiling she tells me,
"There is one last price."
It is only when she brings me into the shadow of the tree that had, for so long, been my prison, that I know what she wants of me.
"This is too heavy a price."
"You wished for freedom, did you not?"
"Freedom from its cage, not from life."
"For you there is no distinction."
With those words everything becomes clear to me and, torch clenched hard in my hand, I set ablaze the Tree, The flurry within and the last residual ties that my sprit has to
life.
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T: So there we go, my first fic with Tree –san, or at least the one within it, as a central character. Hoping someone likes this despite its oddity! Expect the next Flurryverse fic Monday at the latest. R+R